Dr. Nancy Warren

Specializations:

Early Modern Studies

Gender Studies

Medieval Studies

Religion, Literature, and Culture

Transnational Literatures

Research Interests:

Dr. Warren’s areas of specialization include medieval and early modern literature and culture; female spirituality; transnational approaches to literature (especially England, France, and Spain); and intersections of gender, religion, and nationality.

Publications:

Building on emerging cross-disciplinary trends in feminist scholarship on medieval religion, Warren extends ongoing debates about textual and economic constructions of women’s identities to the rarely considered evidence of monastic theory and practice. To this end, Spiritual Economies emphasizes that the cloister was not impermeable. As worldly forces such as economic trends and political conflicts affected life in the nunneries, so too did religious practices havepolitical impact. In breaking down the convent wall, Warren also succeeds in breaching the boundaries separating the material and the symbolic, the religious and the secular, the literary and the historical.

The late-medieval movement into ‘vernacular theology,’ as it has come to be called, inspired many forms of literary expression, in all the languages of Europe. Spanning a wide field, the contributors to this volume consider hagiography, translations of and commentaries on scripture, accounts of visionary experiences, and devotional literature.

The religious and political spheres of the later medieval and early modern periods were tightly and indisputably interwoven, as illustrated by the papal schism, the Hundred Years War, the Reconquest of Spain, and the English Reformation. In these events as well as in the larger religiopolitical systems in which they unfolded, female saints, devout lay women, and monastic women played central roles.